Applying Database Repliation to Multi-player Online Games

Multi-player Online Games (MOGs) have emerged as popular data intensive applications in recent years. Being used
by many players simultaneously, they require a high degree
of fault tolerance, scalability and performance. In this paper
we analyze how database replication can be used in MOGs
to achieve these goals. In data replication, clients can read
data from any database replica while updates have to be
executed at all available replicas. Thus, reads can be distributed among the replicas leading to reduced response time
and scalability. Furthermore, the system is fault-tolerant as
long as a replica is available. However, we are not aware
of any previous study on the application of database replication to MOG. In this paper, we present a system, MiddleSIR, which provides database replication support. We
illustrate different replication protocols implemented in the
system along an example, explaining how data consistency
and fault tolerance can be achieved. From there, we design
a small multi-player typing game to demonstrate how to apply database replication to MOG. We will discuss how different replication protocols affect the semantics of the game.
Our experiments show that database replication can provide
good scalability and performance in both Local Area Net-
works (LAN) and Wide Area Networks (WAN).
ACM Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames), Oct.2006